See all the lens flare/bloom around all the lights on the street? The smoke is real, the rest is just lights that the photographer decided to dramatize by over exposing the picture. There are no flames visible in that picture.

Although many photos shared on social media show flames shooting from rooftops, officials say no buildings were ever engulfed in flames. Instead, the flames probably shot up through the building's ventilation system.

So this fire just looked bad but was just a big nothing.

The "six story" building thing also appeared to somehow grow to what, twenty floors?

See all the lens flare/bloom around all the lights on the street? The smoke is real, the rest is just lights that the photographer decided to dramatize by over exposing the picture. There are no flames visible in that picture.

See all the lens flare/bloom around all the lights on the street? The smoke is real, the rest is just lights that the photographer decided to dramatize by over exposing the picture. There are no flames visible in that picture.

[pbs.twimg.com image 600x800]

That's some impressive overexposure.

(if not full-up fraud)

It's not necessarily fraud or overexposure... The human eye's dynamic range is so enormous compared to even a good camera, let alone a crummy phone camera, that there likely was no "correct" exposure here. Go up on a hill overlooking town some time near twilight, take a good look with your eyes, then try and get the same from a camera without using an HDR compositing program.

/cameras recover from saturation overload way, way faster than eyes though